Resistance Training - The Stotan Way - Training to be a Champion Like Percy Wells Cerutty
It is 42 years since Australian miler Herb Elliott broke the world’s record for the mile by the largest margin in history. His coach, Percy Wells Cerutty, was a pioneer in many aspects of training. His most well known approach was to have his athletes run up and down a long sand dune till they were completely fatigued. I was the last coach to train with Cerutty as I set up a tour for him in 1974 when I was Director of the Esalen Sports Center in San Francisco and Big Sur California. By then, an elder sage, I learned his training principles and was the last person to receive the synthesis of his complete program for training athletes to become world champions. One of the wonderful things that will occur in 2003 is a new biography on Cerutty’s life and work. The biography is written by Graem Sims, the editor of InSport, the largest sport magazine in Australia. The long overdue publication will cover Cerutty’s work in training over 30 world record holders, and his innovative resistance training methods.
At Life University from 1991 to 2001 my cross-country and track teams won 12 national championships and I was named coach of the year on three separate occasions. To accomplish this status of championship performance I used Cerutty’s methods and even built an artificial sand dune. In this day of massive weight training, ply metrics, and other toughening workouts, few realize how sand dune and hill training can enhance a training program. The Kenyan distance runners, always among the finest in the world, realize the benefits of hill training. Resistance training, strength work that utilizes the power of a resisting locality has many benefits- among them are the following:
- You get a maximum (anaerobic) workout without having to move at full speed.
- If the surface is soft you can go to exhaustion and even fall while trying your utmost to break through to a higher level of fitness
- Mental training toughness and even spiritual sport development can be combined with sand dune training-For instance, think of St. Francis, and try to go for the maximum. When we were attempting to break through physically and mentally we had an ultimate workout we called “Death by Dunes.”
In 1995 at Life University we built a $3 million dollar track stadium in anticipation of the Atlanta Games. The track had to be built where the sand dune was placed. We had to dissemble the dune, but the photograph in this article will give you an impression of what our two 50 meter dunes looked like. Especially, if you are a developing nation or small school and can’t afford an expensive track facility, a sand dune can be built for about $15,000 and it might even be a better tool for your future champions than the hard surfaces of tracks we have been taught to train on.